28.381, Review: Discourse Analysis; Ling Theories; Socioling: Stoian (2015)

Wed Jan 18 18:42:50 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-381. Wed Jan 18 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.381, Review: Discourse Analysis; Ling Theories; Socioling: Stoian (2015)

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Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2017 13:42:35
From: Richard Hallett [R-Hallett at neiu.edu]
Subject: The Discourse of Tourism and National Heritage

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-273.html

AUTHOR: Claudia Elena Stoian
TITLE: The Discourse of Tourism and National Heritage
SUBTITLE: A Contrastive Study from a Cultural Perspective
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Richard W Hallett, Northeastern Illinois University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

Summary

A revised version of the author’s Ph.D. thesis, “The discourse of tourism and
national heritage” by Claudia Elena Stoian, presents a Systemic Functional
analysis of online national tourism promotion in Romania, Spain, and Great
Britain, in order to examine how these ‘different countries promote their
national World Heritage Sites online for an international audience’ (71). The
chapters in this volume are organized in four parts: Introduction, Theoretical
background, Study, and Conclusions. In Ch 1, ‘Introduction’ (3-16), which
comprises the whole of Part I, Stoian claims that the research presented in
this text ‘studies the way each country presents its national landmarks and
combines various modes to create a virtual brochure containing a promotional
message’ (14). 

Part II is comprised of four chapters, a summary, and statement of the
research questions. In Ch 2, ‘Tourism’ (19-29), S gives a brief overview of
some of the linguistic research on the study of cultural tourism, destination
branding, and tourism websites. In Ch 3, ‘Promotional tourism discourse’
(31-42), S discusses online tourism promotion, including the language and
images used in such promotion, and presents the three main functions of the
tourist message, i.e. to inform, to persuade, and to direct (36). In Ch 4,
‘Multimodal discourse analysis’ (43-59) S briefly discusses Systemic
Functional Theory (Halliday 1985, Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and its
theoretical metafunctions, i.e. ideational, logical, experiential,
interpersonal, and textual; as well as the functions found in Visual Design
Theory (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996), i.e. representational, interactive, and
compositional. In Ch 5, ‘Culture’ (61-69), S discusses the differences between
Hall’s (1976) notions of ‘High-context’ and ‘Low-context’ cultures; in
essence, High-context cultures assume in-group knowledge of various things
whereas Low-context cultures do not. Accordingly, much more information is
explicitly given in a Low-context culture. S’s study assumes that the Romanian
and Spanish cultures are High-context cultures, British culture a Low-context
culture. Part II ends with the presentation of S’s general research question
and the three specific research questions related to her study.

Part III contains the bulk of the book. Ch 6, ‘Methodology’ (75-81), provides
the research design, the choice of sets of websites (one ‘institutional’ and
one ‘commercial’ for each of the three countries), the choice of English as
the only promotional language to be investigated, and a description of the
corpora for each national heritage site. Ch 7, ‘Institutional corpus: Results
and discussion’ (83-181), offers linguistic and visual analyses of the
websites for the Monastery of Horezu, the Dacian Fortresses of the Orastie
Mountains, and the Sighisoara heritage sites in Romania; the Monastery of El
Escorial, the Alhambra, and the Santiago de Compostela heritage sites in
Spain; and Canterbury Cathedral, the Tower of London, and Edinburgh heritage
sites in Great Britain. In Ch 8, ‘Commercial corpus: Results and discussion’
(183-246), S provides the same linguistic and visual analyses of websites for
the same heritage sites, including twenty-two summary tables. In Ch 9,
‘Comparison and interpretation of results’ (247-292), S summarizes her
findings, stating ‘The institutional set is more multimodal than the
commercial ones, especially in its home pages’ (259).

Part IV is comprised of Ch 10, ‘Conclusions’ (295-299), Appendix A: Linguistic
analyses (301-380), Bibliography (381-405), and Index (407). At the end of Ch
10, S offers practical implications for the field of online tourism.

Critical Evaluation

This book is detailed and yet incomplete. On the one hand, this book contains
excellent examples of how sophisticated Systemic Functional and Visual Design
analyses should be conducted. Scholars conducting similar studies will find
S’s templates for the experiential, interpersonal, and textual analyses,
complete with cells for the subject, mood, residue, predicator, complement,
adjunct, theme, and rheme, very handy tools for future Systemic Functional
analyses. On the other hand, there are glaring omissions in the review of
literature, especially in the sources that specifically examine online tourism
websites. There is no reference to Dann’s (1996) seminal work on the
sociolinguistics of tourism. There is no reference to Hallett and
Kaplan-Weinger’s (2010) text that contains a chapter solely on the multimodal
discourse analysis of the official tourism website for Santiago de Compostela.
Even worse, S makes odd, unsubstantiated/ unreferenced claims, e.g. ‘Blue is
considered the most universally favoured colour and, therefore, the safest to
use in business. It helps building customer loyalty, as it relates to trust,
honesty and dependability’ (183) and ‘The background colour plays an important
role in the way information is presented; the institutional prefers the usual
and traditional white, while the commercial goes for more connotative colours
that convey reliability and trustworthiness and differentiate the company from
its competitors’ (259). Such claims are disappointing; a better analysis would
reference existing statements about the significance of various colors in
Visual Design Theory.

In her writing S also makes lackluster claims, e.g. ‘To summarise, the
institutional and commercial sets of websites share a number of similarities
and differ in particular ways, as expected considering their types’ (263).
Moreover, S has included several blurred screenshots of websites that did not
grant permission for use in this publication. This fact is annoying given that
their inclusion adds nothing to her analysis or illustration of her claims. By
comparison, Dann’s (1996) book offers several detailed descriptions of images
in tourism materials without including any of them. Dann was able to describe
images in detail, which is preferable to the inclusion of  blurred pictures
that do not necessarily add much to the analysis. In all, this work reads more
like a hastily-published dissertation than a condensed, focused book.

References

Dann, Graham M.S. 1996. The language of tourism: A sociolinguistic
perspective. Wallingford: CAB International.

Hallett, Richard W. and Judith Kaplan-Weinger. 2010. Official tourism
websites: A discourse analysis perspective. Bristol: Channel View.

Hall, Edward T. 1976. Beyond culture. New York: Doubleday.

Halliday, M.A.K. 1985. An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward
Arnold.

Halliday, M.A.K. and Christian Matthiessen. 2004. An introduction to
functional grammar, 3rd ed. London: Edward Arnold.

Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leewuen. 1996. Reading images: The grammar of
visual design. London: Routledge.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Richard W. Hallett is Professor of Linguistics at Northeastern Illinois
University in Chicago. His research interests include world Englishes, second
language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and the discourse of tourism. He is
currently on sabbatical working on a linguistic analysis of the Incredible
India tourism campaign.

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